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Many homeowners have reduced their fossil fuel consumption by placing solar panels on their rooftops. But one man has gone to a whole new level. He’s created a homemade power plant that runs on solar power and hydrogen fuel cells. Brad Linder reports:

Mike Strizki’s been tinkering with cars his whole life. Over time the 49-year old engineer became convinced that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles were the future of the auto industry. But during his 16 years with the New Jersey Department of Transportation, Strizki saw there was a problem with fuel cell cars: nobody was really building them.

“You had the auto makers and you had government pointing fingers. Well, you know, you build the fuel cell cars first and then we’ll provide the infrastructure. And they said, well you provide the infrastructure, and we’ll build the fuel cell cars. And I got tired of hearing that argument. And I said well, one way to solve the problem is to make your infrastructure your home.”

Five years and half a million dollars later, Strizki’s achieved his dream.

Here’s how it works. Strizki’s garage is covered with solar panels. They provide electricity for his house, and when there’s extra power, it’s routed to a device called an electrolizer, which breaks down water into hydrogen and oxygen.

During the summer, the hydrogen is stored in fuel tanks on Strizki’s property. And in the winter, he runs the hydrogen through a 6 kilowatt fuel cell to make energy. Strizki, his wife, and three children, are the first family in the country to live in a house powered entirely by hydrogen fuel cells and solar power.

And there’s another benefit: Strizki can fuel up his hydrogen fuel cell vehicles at a gas pump near his garage.

(Car accelerating sound on pavement)

“The fuel cells have enough to run the vehicle at about 50mph on fuel cells alone. If you’re going faster than that you’re sipping off the battery pack at a very low rate.”

Strizki helped design this car for Rutgers University 7 years ago. It’s been running ever since. Now that he has a fueling station at his home, he plans to convert his other car, a Toyota Prius, to run on hydrogen as well.

Strizki pulls up to the hydrogen fueling station – a series of converted propane tanks out by his garage. Opening his car’s trunk, Strizki connects a hose from those tanks to a smaller tank in the car.

“That’s how it refuels.”

Strizki’s system runs like a well oiled machine, only without the oil. But it wasn’t always so simple. When he first decided to build his home power plant, Strizki sought government approval from his home town of East Amwell New Jersey.

“I said all right, I’m doing this like anybody else who’s getting a building permit. I walked into the town and I said here, I want to build a solar hydrogen fuel cell home… and well, that… you know, the first place I went was the zoning officer, and he told me it’s an uncustomary use in a residential zone, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I allow this.”

East Amwell Mayor Kurt Hoffman says the zoning officer was known as a stickler. The township had accidentally removed a line in a local zoning law allowing homeowners to use alternative energy.

“So we did an addendum to the zoning ordinance to allow alternative energy usages. These kinds of things, they have to be publicly noticed, you have to have public hearings. That brought out some people’s concern about hydrogen technology and the safety issue.

Hoffman says Strizki brought in a series of experts to testify that his house wasn’t going to blow up. The hydrogen was being stored at a safe pressure in the same type of tank normally used for propane.

Strizki says he’ll probably never make back the half-million dollars it costs to build his system. But he hopes to cut the costs by 90%, by mass producing and selling solar-hydrogen fuel cell systems to other homeowners. He says the future of the planet depends on renewable energy and not fossil fuels that have to be transported halfway across the world.

“At least the fact that I’m using the energy in the same place that I’ve created it, the energy is still zero carbon, and it’s still free, once you’ve paid for the equipment.

The Strizki’s don’t skimp on electricity. They have a big screen TV, a hot tub, and all modern appliances. And Strizki takes great pride in the fact that he can power everything, including his car, using renewable hydrogen power.

“There’s no shelf life, and that’s what powers the sun. When the sun stops shining, we’re all dead. So this is a much better solution than digging big holes in the ground, throwing sulfur up into the air. This is something that’s definitely sustainable. We just have to have the will to do it.”

For the Environment Report, I’m Brad Linder.

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The company accused of “killing the electric car” says it’s going to bring a new version of plug-in car back to the market. General Motors recently unveiled plans for a new hybrid SUV. But as Dustin Dwyer reports, the CEO of GM says he’s not sure when the vehicle will be on the roads:

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The company accused of “killing the electric car” says it’s going to bring a new version of plug-in car back to the market. General Motors recently unveiled plans for a new hybrid SUV. They claim the new technology will get double the gas mileage of any current SUV. But as Dustin Dwyer reports, the CEO of GM says he’s not sure when the vehicle will be on the roads:

GM CEO Rick Wagoner announced the hybrid project at the Los Angeles Auto Show. He said the vehicle would have the ability to be plugged into a wall, to use more electricity and less gas.

The announcement was part of a major speech on GM’s commitment to alternative technologies.

And, although Wagoner set no dates for when his company would have these technologies, Bradley Berman of hybridcars.com says the speech was a big first step.

“For so long, we didn’t even hear the right talk. How can you walk the right walk if you’re not even talking the right talk? At least now it’s the right message. It’s the right way of looking at it. And that sounds promising.”

Berman says GM still has a long way to go to catch up with rival Toyota on hybrid technology.

For the Environment Report, I’m Dustin Dwyer.

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An emerging fish disease known as viral hemorrhagic septicemia, or VHS, has prompted a proposed ban on the use of ballast water in the Great Lakes. Chuck Quirmbach reports the proposed ban is leading to predictions of economic disruption:

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An emerging fish disease known as viral hemorrhagic septicemia, or VHS, has prompted a proposed ban on the use of ballast water in the Great Lakes. The proposed ban is leading to predictions of economic disruption. Chuck Quirmbach reports:

The US Government has put temporary limits on the shipments of live fish from the great lakes states. That’s because of a virus in some great lakes waters that is fatal to fish. The state of Michigan says a better way to prevent that virus from spreading is to ban freshwater ships from taking in ballast water from the lakes that are contaminated.

Jim Weakley is president of the Lake Carriers Association. He says ships couldn’t operate if they couldn’t take on ballast.

“You’re talking about shutting down the movement of iron ore, coal, limestone, cement, salt; all the products we move that keep the manufacturing basis of this area moving.”

Environmental groups support the proposed ban on ballast water intake, saying ballast transfers move around a lot of unwanted species.

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While people are lining up to see animated penguins with “happy feet,” environmental groups are predicting some breeds of the bird will go extinct because of global warming. Lester Graham reports:

Penguins are popular these days. Last year people flocked to the theatre to see the documentary March of the Penguins. This year they’re laughing at penguins in the animated movie Happy Feet.

But the Center for Biological Diversity says the penguins are in serious danger. It’s calling for protections for the birds.

Kassie Siegel is Director of the Center’s Climate, Air and Energy Program. The group is petitioning the government to protect 12 breeds of penguins under the Endangered Species Act.

“And we believe if and when penguins are listed, just like polar bears that we’ve also petitioned for, that entities that are responsible for major sources of greenhouse gas emissions would have additional regulation to consider the impact of those emissions on listed species.”

Siegel says some of these penguins will go extinct in coming decades unless greenhouse gas pollution is brought under control within the next ten years.

For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

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The federal government is deciding whether to regulate products of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is the process of manufacturing particles to a very small size. They can be as small as one-millionth the width of a head of a pin. Rebecca Williams reports some people worry these tiny particles could harm people and wildlife:

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The federal government is deciding whether to regulate products of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is the process of manufacturing particles to a very small size. They can be as small as one-millionth the width of a head of a pin. Rebecca Williams reports some people worry these tiny particles could harm people and wildlife:

Nano particles are already in products on the market… in things like sunscreens, food containers, and clothing.

Andrew Maynard is the chief science advisor to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies. He says there are about 350 products made with nanotechnology. Maynard says nano particles can make products better, but there might also be risks to people and the environment that researchers don’t yet understand.

“If you’re beginning to make materials at this very very small scale, there’s a possibility they’ll get into places you don’t really want them to be, and they’ll start behaving in unusual ways.”

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These SF6 circuit breakers are part of an electric grid. They are filled with compressed sulfur-hexafluoride gas which acts to open and close the switch contacts. The gas is a concern because it is 24,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a heat-trapping gas. (Photo courtesy of OSHA).

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The government is urging electric utilities to do more to stop leaks of the most potent greenhouse gas on the planet. Lester Graham reports the government program for the utilities is voluntary:

The gas sulfur hexafluoride is 24,000 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Electric utilities use 80% of the gas made as an insulator for high voltage switches.

Dina Kruger is with the US Environmental Protection Agency. She says the switches can leak.

“You know, the gas either leaks out slowly over time or can get vented in large quantities during maintenance of the equipment, and both of those provide an opportunity to reduce emissions. So, it’s not necessarily the case that you need to ban a chemical like this to avoid emissions to the atmosphere. You can also avoid those emissions through careful management.”

But, only a little more than half of the electric utilities in the nation have signed up for the EPA’s voluntary program to reduce emissions of the potent greenhouse gas.

Alewives held up in a net. Alewives are an invasive species on which introduced salmon and other predator fish feed. They are among the prey fish species that have declined severely in Lake Huron. (Photo courtesy of MI DNR.)

Transcript

The fisheries in the Great Lakes are seeing dramatic changes. In one lake, an invasive species that has become part of the food chain has collapsed. But, some native fish are doing better because of that collapse. Lester Graham reports some fishery managers are debating what to do next:

When we started digging canals, connecting the lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, things changed a lot for the fish in the Great Lakes.

First, the sea lamprey got into the lakes through the Welland canal that bypasses Niagara Falls.

The lamprey is an eel-like parasite that nearly wiped out the big fish in the Great Lakes by attaching to them and sucking the life out of them.

Also slipping through the canals was a smaller fish, the alewife. Since the lamprey wiped out most of the predator fish in the lakes, the alewife population exploded. They out-competed native fish for food. It got so bad, that by the mid 1960s, if you weighed all the fish in Lake Michigan, more than 80% of the weight would have been alewives.

So, once wildlife managers got the sea lamprey under control, they had to figure out what they could do to get alewives under control. The fish biologists decided to introduce new predators, trout and salmon, to prey on the alewives. These fish were not native to the Great Lakes. Expensive nurseries were built by federal and state game agencies to keep supplying new trout and salmon every year to prey on alewives.

Forty years later, in Lake Huron, the alewife population collapsed, and in Lake Michigan alewives are declining rapidly. Mission accomplished, right?

Well, in that 40 years, a whole recreational fishing industry has grown up around fishing for those introduced trout and salmon. Some fishery managers now say we have to find a balance of the right amount of alewives to sustain the introduced trout and salmon fishery. So, recently states have cut their trout and salmon stocking programs to give alewives a chance to recover.

Tom Trudeau [who] operates a fish nursery for the state of Illinois says it would cause trouble to try to take the Great Lakes back to native fish only.

“We do have this industry that we have pressure to keep. You know, you’re putting a lot of people out of business if you get rid of it.”

And Trudeau says because of ecological damage, many of the smaller native fish on which big predators used to feed have been wiped out.

“So, I mean, of the six or seven species in that category, we only have one. And a couple of them are extinct. So, I mean, we could talk about going back to the ideal situation of pure native species, but we’ve disrupted the habitat so much.”

So, the argument goes, the invasive alewives are now needed. But something unexpected happened when the alewives disappeared from Lake Huron. The native fish, walleye, yellow perch, and lake trout started doing better.

Dave Fielder is a fisheries research biologist with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

“We’ve long known that adult alewives were a predator and a competitor on newly hatched perch and walleye fry. We just didn’t realize how substantial that effect was until finally the adult alewives were removed from the system and now we’re enjoying some greatly increased reproductive success. Walleye, particularly in Saginaw bay, are at some of the highest levels that we’ve seen in a long time.”

But, after 40 years, people are used to fishing for those introduced trout and salmon. And some fisheries managers are wondering what will happen to all those expensive nurseries that provide their jobs.

What happens to all of those charter boat fishing operations, fishing tourism, if the government were to stop stocking those trout and salmon? Would they switch to fishing for native fish? And, can the native fish even survive in the long-run since so many of the smaller native prey-fish are no longer around?

Dave Fielder says it’s hard to say.

“So, we’re kind of in the middle of a change – it’s really a paradigm shift in many ways – and that’s always scary because nobody really knows how we’re going to end up, but I prefer to be optimistic. I think there are a lot of reasons to be hopeful in regards to the benefits that we’re seeing for our native species.”

But some fisheries managers say the debate of whether to go all native or to try to find the right mix of native and non-native fish is not over. Since invasive species, pollution, and habitat destruction have changed the Great Lakes so much, wildlife managers think they’ll still have to keep stocking one kind of fish or another to keep the recreational fishing industry going. If that’s the case, does it matter whether it’s native fish, or the introduced fish that anglers have grown to like so much?

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Views like this attract new housing developments around the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. (Photo courtesty of the National Park Service.)

Some housing developers are planting only native species in and around their new developments to help protect the park's biodiversity. (Photo courtesty of the National Park Service.)

In recent years, the land surrounding America’s national parks has become attractive to residential developers. But the landscaping in these new neighborhoods can often feature aggressive, exotic plants, many of which threaten to choke out native plants. Now, a new program aims to keep these plants from sneaking their way into the nation’s most-visited park. As Matt Shafer Powell reports, the program depends upon an uncommon alliance of environmentalists and developers:
http://environmentreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/powell_120406.mp3

Transcript

In recent years, the land surrounding America’s national parks has become attractive to residential developers. But the landscaping in these new neighborhoods can often feature aggressive, exotic plants, many of which threaten to choke out native plants. Now, a new program aims to keep these plants from sneaking their way into the nation’s most-visited park. As Matt Shafer Powell reports, the program depends upon an uncommon alliance of environmentalists and developers:

Jason Love is standing next to a wall of roadside rock. He’s watching as the mimosa trees anchored in the rock wave in the wind from a passing stream of cars. The cars are all headed to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, only a few miles down the road. These days, he says the mimosas are a predictable part of the landscape for those visitors heading into the park.

“The mimosa was probably planted as an ornamental and from there, was spread by birds eating the seeds, and now, instead of just being in one place in one person’s yard, you can see it up and down the roadside here.”

Love is an ecologist with the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont. It’s an environmental education group that works with the Park Service. Love admits the mimosas are beautiful trees, with their brilliant spray of pink and white flowers and their strong perfume-like scent. His problem with them is that they’re killing off some of the plants that have called the Smokies home for thousands of years.

“We see more and more of these invasive exotics creeping up along the park’s edges and that makes it harder to control inside the park because just as birds brought this mimosa here beside us, these same birds go inside the park and carry these same seeds and then the park has to actively deal with it.”

And the park does deal with it the best it can. Each year, the Park Service spends a lot of money and time monitoring the plants inside the park and yanking out any invasives. The question is why, especially if the mimosas are so appealing. Back at the Tremont Institute, Love has a simple answer.

“We love this environment. This is the Smoky Mountains. It has over 130 species of trees, more than all of Europe. And when we bring in these invasive exotic plants, we are lessening that diversity, we’re making it a little less special.”

With new neighborhoods full of exotic invasives creeping toward the park, the park service and the Tremont institute decided the best way to address the problem was by educating developers. So they created a pilot program called the Native Landscape Certification Program. It’s a voluntary program where residential developers like Robin Turner promise to use only native plants in their landscaping schemes. Turner is currently developing a neighborhood on more than seven hundred wooded acres next to the park.

“That’s really why we’re all here. We’re here because of the beauty of this place, I mean we can pick anywhere in the country to live and we’ve picked this region because of the park and because of the National Forest and because of what’s here.”

Turner is sitting on the back porch of his sales office, a refurbished one room schoolhouse that stands only a few feet from a creek that dribbles through the development. He says he wants his exclusive – and expensive – development to blend in seamlessly with the natural landscape of the park. But he says it also has to make financial sense.

“It’s the right thing to do and it’s excellent business. I mean, we will make a very nice living doing this. I think our sales are higher and we’re getting higher prices because of what we’re doing.”

Ultimately, that’s what will determine the success or failure of such agreements. Meredith Clebsch runs an East Tennessee nursery that specializes in native plants.

“It comes down to money with them. Most of the time, they’re not going to be environmentalists like some of us might be, so they’re going to have to have a reason that it’s going to be beneficial to their pocketbook and you know, their customers have to want it.”

For the folks at the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont, this idea of ecologists and developers reading from the same page takes a little getting used to. Ken Vorhis is the Executive Director of the Tremont Institute. He says he often has some explaining to do to his environmentally conscious friends.

“Some people say, ‘Oh, you’re joining up with the developers, aren’t you? Going over to the dark side?’ And we’re saying “No, these people want to do it right. There are going to be developments, we need economic development, those kinds of things, but can we do it in a way that makes more sense, that’s sustainable, a way that is environmentally friendly.”

Voorhis admits that the Native Landscape Certification Program isn’t going to resolve all of the friction between the forces of development and natural preservation. But he says it may be an important first step.